Stop Asking IT to Understand Business: It’s a False Proposition in Itself

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“The new system isn’t delivering results, and it’s all because your IT team did a poor job! Things ran smoothly without a system, but now everything’s a mess with one!” Amid the wave of digital transformation, this classic “blame-shifting” line remains a persistent pain point for countless CIOs and IT directors. They are thrust onto the forefront of change, tasked with driving business growth through KPIs, yet often find themselves with nothing but a hammer, seeing every challenge as a nail. Meanwhile, business departments hold complex “blueprints” for operations, leaving the two sides talking past each other.

The slogan “IT must understand business” is like a “one-size-fits-all remedy” applied to the flaws of every digital project. It sounds utterly correct, yet is utterly hollow. We invest significant time training IT staff on metrics like OEE and SKU turnover, even sending them to factory floors and warehouses. In the end, the gap between IT and business remains as wide as ever.

Why? Because we’ve been asking the wrong question from the start. “IT understanding business” may, in fact, be a false proposition in itself. It assumes a fundamental premise: IT and business are two separate “tribes” that need an “interpreter” to communicate. But in the true era of digitalization, our goal should not be to train interpreters. Instead, we need to tear down the boundaries between the tribes and merge them into an entirely new, unified entity.

What We Lack Is Not an Interpreter, but a Shared Belief

Years ago, IT departments were established to serve and support the business. Their core value lies in stability, security and efficiency, much like the property management of a building that is responsible for ensuring the normal supply of water, electricity and internet. Business departments, by contrast, are like the companies operating within the building; their goals revolve around growth, profits and market share. The property management aims to “avoid problems,” while the companies strive to “achieve great things.” From the very start, the underlying logics of these two sides have been fundamentally different.

This organizational inertia has built a “Tower of Babel” in the digital world. IT teams use technical “bricks” to build upward, talking about architecture, concurrency and APIs; business teams expand outward with business logic, discussing customers, channels and conversion rates. Both sides work hard to prove their value to the “God” (the boss), yet they speak completely different languages.

Asking IT to “understand business” is like asking an electrician from the property management to grasp the trading model of an investment bank. He can learn what K-lines or options are through training, but he will never truly understand the fear and greed of traders in a world where profits and losses are decided in milliseconds. He can ensure the stability of the trading system, but he cannot take responsibility for the success of trading strategies.

This is the crux of the problem. We demand that IT take responsibility for business outcomes, yet we do not give them the authority to change business processes; we regard IT as a cost center, yet we expect it to create excess value. This mismatch between responsibility and authority is the fundamental reason why the gap can never be bridged. As the management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

If the organizational culture and structure remain unchanged, any effort to make IT “understand business” unilaterally will eventually be swallowed up by the powerful culture of inter-departmental barriers.

From Business Interpreters to Business Technologists

Where is the way out? The answer is to stop training interpreters and start fostering business technologists. This is not a new term; Gartner coined the concept years ago. But it is no longer just a theory. It has become a necessity for enterprises to survive in the deep waters of digitalization.

What is a business technologist? They are not IT professionals who know a little about business, nor business professionals who know a little about technology. They are an entirely new hybrid, combining the logical framework of technical experts with the growth-oriented mindset of business professionals.

Their primary “language” is “business outcomes.” When a business department says, “We need to improve OEE,” an ordinary IT professional might ask, “What is OEE? What data fields do we need?” A business technologist, by contrast, would directly respond with questions like, “Are we looking to improve OEE to solve order delivery delays, or to reduce unit production costs? If it’s the former, should we prioritize focusing on line changeover efficiency and equipment failure early warning? If it’s the latter, is the granularity of our yield data collection detailed enough?”

See the difference? They do not get stuck on technical implementation; instead, they cut straight to the core of the business problem. Their thinking starts not with “how to build a system,” but with “how to solve a problem and create value.” This shift does not happen overnight. It requires IT professionals to undergo a profound identity transformation.

From Project Deliverers to Value Co-Creators. IT is no longer a passive receiver of requirements that simply signs off at the end of a business process flowchart. From the very first day a project is initiated, IT teams must sit at the same table as business departments. Like co-founders, they work together to define problems, design solutions, share risks, and split benefits. In project review meetings, CIOs and business directors should sit side by side, jointly addressing questions from the CEO.

Building Empathy as a Core Technical Competence. Empathy should be regarded as a core technical capability. In the past, we sent IT staff to workshop floors for job rotations. If the only goal was to help them recognize equipment and understand processes, our vision was too narrow. The true purpose is to let them feel—It is to let them feel the frustration of a warehouse manager struggling to operate a small PDA screen with frozen fingers in an -18°C cold storage. It is to let them feel the remorse of a production line supervisor when an entire batch of products is scrapped due to a single data entry error.

The quality of a technical solution does not depend on the elegance of its code, but on its understanding and improvement of human circumstances. Only when IT truly feels the pain points of the business can its solutions avoid being cold piles of functions. Instead, they become warm carriers of value.

How Organizations Systematically Cultivate Business Technologists

It is naive and irresponsible to pin all hopes on the self-development of IT professionals. This must be a top-down organizational transformation.

Step 1: Leaders Must Act as Chief “Barrier Breakers”

Digital transformation is a “top leader-led initiative, and this is by no means an empty slogan. CEOs need to take concrete actions to break down inter-departmental barriers. For example, establish a “Digital Transformation Task Force” composed of both IT and business professionals, with direct reporting lines to the CEO. The KPI of this task force should not be the number of systems launched, but the tangible improvements in operational efficiency, cost reduction, and new revenue generation. As Ren Zhengfei put it, “Let those who hear the gunfire call for fire support.” This task force is exactly that “special unit” that can both hear the gunfire and call for support.

Step 2: Restructure Evaluation and Incentive Mechanisms

If IT departments are still evaluated based on metrics like system downtime and requirement response speed, they will never have the motivation to care about business growth. IT evaluation must be strongly tied to business outcomes. For the IT team responsible for a new retail system, their bonuses should come from the increase in online sales and member repurchase rates driven by the system, not whether the project was delivered on time. Where money goes, attention follows.

Step 3: Promote Mutual Engagement to Help Business Teams Understand Technology

This does not mean asking business directors to learn Python; it means helping them understand the possibilities and limitations of technology. Organize regular “technology literacy” seminars, using language that business teams can understand to explain concepts like AI, low-code platforms, and data middle platforms. When business teams stop viewing AI as an all-powerful magic and instead understand its essence as data-based probability prediction, their requirements will become more practical, and communication efficiency with IT will improve exponentially.

Step 4: Involve IT in Business Processes

Embed IT teams, especially product managers and architects, directly into business teams’ workspaces. Let them attend business teams’ weekly and monthly meetings, eat together, and share feedback. This allows them to gradually learn business “jargon” and understand business rhythms. This “embedded” work model is far more effective than any formal training. It creates an environment where synergy can occur naturally.

Back to the Original Question: How Can IT Departments Truly “Understand Business”?

Perhaps the answer will only become clear when we stop discussing this question altogether. On that day, the company’s organizational chart may no longer have clearly divided “IT Departments” and “Business Departments.” Instead, there will be agile teams built around customer value. Each team will include product experts, technical experts, data experts, and marketing experts. They will share a single name: “Growth Teams.”

The end goal of technology is not technology itself, but the success of the business and the realization of human value. Digital transformation is not a one-man show by IT, nor a monologue by business teams. It is a stage play that requires everyone to change their roles, break down boundaries, and reintegrate. Our goal is to make every individual an indispensable “business technologist” in this great drama.